The Interpreter’s Room

The dead man left no final answer. Everyone else has supplied too many.

Nagasaki, 1851. Japanese interpreter Kaji Seijūrō is found dead in a workroom inside the Dutch factory. The foreign merchants cannot settle what happened there, and the Nagasaki magistrate sends an unconventional dōshin to ask the questions.

Naruse Gennōjō reads Dutch well enough to mistrust a translation and badly enough to need Sakaki Sayo, a surgeon from a traditional medical household who takes private reading work without holding an interpreter’s office. A torn sleeve points towards one man, but the witness saw no face and every surviving account has passed through somebody else’s hands.

As a Dutch ship prepares to depart, Naruse and Sayo must separate what the surgeon observed from what the record implies, what a witness remembers from what an inquiry kept—and decide whose name will carry the answer out of the room.

The Interpreter’s Room is Book 1 in Nagasaki Mysteries.